Grahamstown is home to many things. A small university, a host of churches, The National Arts Festival, but most importantly, it is home to creativity. Recently, in an effort to tap into the city’s creative network and provide a year round artistic showcase, Grahamstown has seen the launch of the Creative City project. But [...]

The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City by Kim Gurney (Palgrave Macmillan) “Someone once described writing about performance art as ‘trying to catch lightening in a bottle,’” says Kim Gurney, a research associate at the UCT African Centre for Cities and author of the recently published The Art [...]

“Yoh, this is some Steve Biko shit,” said the high school learner to his friend next to him. I smiled as I overheard their conversation. I was sitting on his other side in the State Theatre in Pretoria in February 2014. We were watching a performance of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Orwell’s original novel [...]

It would be extremely boring/easy to describe WHATEVERLAND as anti-theatre, or “sheer fun” or “abstract” or anything that denotes that, for its three-year (or maybe only seven minutes) run, director Francesco Nassimbeni has refused to submit to plot, or character, or form, or anything you would usually associated with the word “theatre”. Basically, it [...]